La Mosaïque sarantine
Translation by Élisabeth Vonarburg
of
The Sarantine Mosaic
Powerfully written and compulsively readable...
Kay is a storyteller on the grandest scale.
Maclean's
Lord of Emperors is wonderful. I never excpect
less from Guy Gavriel Kay.
- Robert Jordan
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Maclean's - Robert Jordan |
 Illustration : Jacques Lamontagne |
Sarantium is the golden city, the heart and jewel of the Sarantine Empire. Valerius II has recently become its emperor. He is an ambitious monarch, with a subtle and penetrating mind ; at his side is his empress Alixana, a strikingly beautiful woman with a troubled past as a dancer. Around this couple, thousand intrigues are brewing in their luxuriant court. Savage and pagan tribes surround the Empire, and it is imperative that they be contained. And in the middle of the city of cities, in order to glorify Jad, the one god, stands the biggest, richest sanctuary the world has ever known. It is to adorn this monument that one day, in his distant Batiare, a mosaicist named Martinian is summoned to Sarantium. But he feels too old for that journey and it's his younger colleague, Crispin, who will sail to Sarantium in his stead. To say of someone that he is sailing to Sarantium means that his life is about to change, to take another direction, for good or for ill. What Crispin cannot know is that his decision to sail to Sarantium will change the very destiny of the Empire... |
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Guy Gavriel Kay Translation by Élisabeth Vonarburg of |
 Illustration : Jacques Lamontagne |
While Crispin the mosaicist reaches the height of his art decorating the gigantic dome of the sanctuary erected by Emperor Valerius II, the monarch is setting into motion plans to conquer Batiare, the native country of Crispin in the West, and to destabilize Shirvan the great King of Kings of Bassania, in the East. Shirvan is not unaware of the war preparations that are monopolizing the resources of the Sarantine Empire and, in secret, he has dispatched a mission to Rustem of Kerakek, a physician who's saved his life. And so, like Crispin, Rustem sails to Sarantium, for good or for ill. As soon as he arrives in the city of cities, the physician is caught in the incredibly complex Sarantine intrigues and, like Crispin, he becomes one of the linchpins on which the fate of a whole world depends, as well as the destinies of an emperor and of his empress... Seigneur des empereurs (Lord of Emperors), the conclusion of Guy Gavriel Kay's most ambitious historical recreation, the Sarantine Mosaic. |
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Guy Gavriel Kay Translation by Élisabeth Vonarburg of |
